Sarah Meyohas’s Cloud of Petals presents new and previous work together that examines themes of beauty and labor in an automated society.

This multi-layered project began in 2016 at Eero Saarinen’s Bell Works in Holmdel, New Jersey, where the artist organized a crew of 16 men to pluck the petals off 10,000 roses. These performers selected and photographed each petal according to the artist’s stringent guidelines. The images were then uploaded to a cloud server, where they became “inputs for an artificial neural network”, an algorithm that builds, connects, and intertwines to create a system that is self-learning, rather than programmed.